BRITISH IRONY

A quiet joke at your expense

Dec 16th 1999 From The Economist print edition

Is the British penchant for irony a cause or cure of national decline?

WHILE working as The Economists man in South-East Asia, your correspondent noticed something peculiar about British diplomats. Their briefings about the countries in which they were based had a common characteristic. They would start with a more or less lucid account of the political and economic situation, followed by a few anecdotes. And thenas often as notour man, in Manila or Bangkok or wherever, would say of the locals: You see they have no sense of irony. The Victorian forebears of todays British diplomats might have remarked on the absence of other traits in foreignersChristianity perhaps, or a sense of honour or diligencebut for todays diplomats, it is irony, or the lack of it, which seems to be most noteworthy. Indeed Robert Cooper, one of the Foreign Offices brightest sparks and currently head of its Asia department, has gone as far as suggesting that irony is at the centre of modern foreign policymaking. In an article in last Decembers Prospect, a high-brow British magazine, Mr Cooper wrote: What else is there left for the citizens of a post-heroic, postimperial, post-modern society? Provided it is tinged with humanity, irony is not such a bad thing. It suggests a certain modesty about oneself, ones values and ones aspirations. At least irony is unlikely to be used to justify programmes of conquest or extermination. Todays British diplomats and officials maintain an instinctive suspicion of grand projects and aspirations, one reason perhaps why they have had such difficulty coping with the vision of a united Europe which has so entranced Britains continental neighbours. The British urge to puncture grandiose visions is captured in a (possibly apocryphal) story about Sir Oliver Franks, when he was Britains ambassador in Washington after the war. A journalist asked leading ambassadors what they desired in the coming year. The Russian ambassador mentioned the liberation of colonial peoples; the French ambassador spoke of a new era of peace and international co-operation. Sir Oliver expressed a desire for a small box of

crystallised fruit. But what exactly is irony, and why do the British appear to prize it so highly? It is important to distinguish irony from sarcasm (which is notoriously the lowest form of wit). Both irony and sarcasm involve saying the opposite of what you mean. But when someone is being sarcastic, there is no doubt that the listener is intended to understand this. I suppose you think thats terribly clever, says the sarcastic teacher to a stupid child. Irony, however is different. Many people, when hearing an ironic remark, may not realise that it is meant in jest. So irony is much more subversive than sarcasm, and also much more funthose who realise that an ironic remark has been made are instantly complicit, and they can enjoy the fact that there are others who have missed the joke. Perhaps this is one reason why irony is a particular Irony is more favourite among British diplomats. It allows them to subversive than tease foreigners, without the foreigners realising they sarcasm, and are being teased. All the diplomatic proprieties can be much more fun observedbut the Brits can still feel quietly superior. In days of yore British superiority was proven by force of arms. Now the point is made with a joke, and a quiet, knowing smile. For as Mr Cooper points out, irony is a distinctly post-imperial quality. While irony aimed at foreigners may seem unpleasantly supercilious, much of the British sense of irony is directed at themselves. Irony is particularly good at puncturing pretension, and at exposing the gap between appearance and reality. Both are useful ways of coping with what might otherwise be a painful processwhat one British diplomat once termed the management of decline. But is irony a cause, as much as a palliative, for British decline? The people who built Victorian Britain and the British empire were characterised by their earnestness, not their sense of irony. Gladstone did not spend much time laughing at himself. Nor was irony a strong suit for Margaret Thatcher, who famously pledged to reassert Victorian values and to reverse British decline. By contrast, the ironists who made the first breaches in the walls of Victorian earnestness were outsiders or dandies, who had none of the macho, empirebuilding virtues. Oscar Wilde titillated Victorian London with his subversive wit, and then scandalised it with the homosexual affairs which ultimately ruined him. George Bernard Shaw, another Irishman, used his plays to satirise and undermine Victorian attitudes to everything from grammar and pronunciation to the arms trade. The French-born Hilaire Belloc punctured imperial triumphalism in 1898 with a brilliant parody of jingoistic verse called The Modern Traveller. (Whatever happens we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not, his languid hero observes of the mutinous natives.) Lytton Strachey, the great debunker of Victorian earnestness, wrote an iconoclastic but telling study of 19th-century heroes, Eminent Victorians, and was also a homosexual and a conscientious objector during the first world war. When he was asked what he would do if he came across a German soldier, raping his sister, Strachey replied: I would endeavour to interpose my body between them. Arguably, in fact, it was the horror of the first world war which completed the transformation in the tone of upper-crust British life, from Victorian earnestness to irony. Of course, irony had been well deployed before the war, as Wildes work showed. But it was the reaction to the horror of the trenches which made it the dominant tone of the post-war British literary scene.

The Victorian ideal stressed honour, duty, self-sacrifice, The horror of the patriotism. Inspired by those ideals, millions of young trenches made men signed up to fight in Flanders, and then irony the encountered four years of mass slaughter. Some 30% dominant tone of of British men aged between 20 and 24 in 1914 were the post-war killed in the war. Noel Annan in his study of 20thcentury Britain (Our Age: The Generation that Made literary scene Post-War Britain, HarperCollins), argues that: The shock of the losses stunned the British; and the lesion of trench warfare and its toll never healed. Lord Annan argues that the reaction of the post-war generation was to seek refuge in subversive irony and humour. Irony, which replaced that [Victorian] innocence, reflected the way men remembered the events of the Great War. This irony served a double purpose. On the one hand, the bright young things celebrated by Evelyn Waugh in the 1920s, wanted simply to be diverted and amused, and to forget the war. But irony also served as a means of attacking the Victorian culture of duty and imperialism which people like Strachey felt had led to the slaughter of the trenches. Stracheys work, as Lord Annan puts it, was designed to undermine the Victorian establishment and its culture. It did so by treating life as a comedy. Stracheys humour was pointed directly at the staples of Victorian imperial mythology. He wrote of General Gordons campaign in the Sudan: It all ended very happilyin a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British empire and a peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring. Even after the second world war, British authors and humourists continued to apply a touch of irony to the horror of 1914-18. A 1960s musical, Oh What a Lovely War, portrayed firstworld-war generals as blimpish idiots. The Cambridge undergraduates who put together Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s had a famous sketch in which an upper-crust military officer approaches a soldier and informs him: We need a pointless sacrifice, and I think youre just the man. To this day, many in the British middle-classes find overt displays of flag-waving patriotism faintly embarrassing. The singing of old imperial anthems like Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory, at the annual Last Night of the Proms concert, regularly provokes condemnation and handwringing in the press. But Simon Hoggart, a columnist in the Guardian, Britains main left-of-centre newspaper, has argued that critics are missing the point. Havent those whiners noticed that these songs morphed into irony decades ago? Does anybody seriously think we hear them and want to take back the Suez Canal? In other words, patriotic display is acceptable to many British people only if it is suitably coated in irony. These attitudes die hard. The ironic tone has become a staple of British literary style, but can still cause considerable confusion overseasas writers for this newspaper occasionally discover. A recent article on Paul Gascoigne, a footballer who had been caught beating his wife, began: It could happen to anybody, really. Go out for a meal with the wife, have a few too many, she starts to nag, and before you know whats happened, shes lying on the floor covered in bruises. It did not occur to the author that anybody might seriously regard this as an endorsement of wife-beatingat least not until the outraged letters began arriving from the United States. In large parts of the British intelligentsia, irony has survived, indeed was bolstered by, the Thatcher period despite (or perhaps because of) the Iron Ladys

resolutely unironic attitude to national affairs. In Tony Blair, Britain now has another prime minister who seems to be a stranger to irony. His eagerness to set the worlds wrongs to rights and to turn Britain into a model country for the next century could not be more Victorianor Thatcherite. Perhaps it is significant that Lady Thatcher represented the first generation to reach national leadership which had no personal memory of the first world war. Harold Macmillan, a prime minister of the 1960s who was famous for his foppish manners and wry wit, was a veteran of 1914-18, and had seen many of his contemporaries killed. Lady Thatcher regarded the Macmillan generation of Tories as people who were prepared to accept gentle national decline. She reserved her fiercest disdain, however, for the Foreign Office, which she regarded as institutionally Tony Blair seems incapable of batting for Britain. It would come as no to be a stranger surprise to the Thatcherites that a Foreign Office man, to irony like Robert Cooper, should recommend irony as the soundest basis for national policylargely because, in Mr Coopers view, not taking things too seriously is a good way of avoiding bloodshed and conflict. Or at least thats what he claimed to believe.